Making Digital Marketing Work for your Business | WSInetMarketing

Just back from the annual WSI Excellence and Innovation (E&I) conference in Paris which was attended by over 150 consultants from Europe, Middle East and US.  Great to see a big growth of high calibre consultants from France and Switzerland.   Just reviewing my notes from last year’s E&I and staggering how much that was new 12 months ago is now mainstream.

The highlight was the keynote from the inimitable Avinask Kaushik (‘Google Analytics Evangelist’, author, speaker).  He described three elements of a great business:  Influence – Experience – Value.  Or to say it another way Marketing – Magic – Money.  He urged us to ‘re-imagine greatness’ for ourselves and our clients.  A really interesting challenge that is actually not that difficult when we have the leveler called the internet where location and size can be unimportant.

Avinask showing rise and fall of newspaper advertising spend

Avinask then went on to discuss how to set up a Content Efficiency Report in Google Analytics with the ultimate purpose of enabling a business to understand just three things about its online visitors : Acquisition, Behaviour and Outcomes.  By understanding these three areas of a website (or ‘webpresence’ to be more general) we can optimise the task completion rate (what ever those tasks are that we want to persuade a visitor to undertake).

His take on facebook was characteristically pithy: “Facebook is only used to waste time, so you had better get them to waste time on your facebook page!”  He showed three examples of facebook pages that do just that (I guess in descending order of ‘sexiness’) : Redbull, M&S and National Express.  There are really only four things to track on social media: conversion rate, amplification rate, applause rate and economic value.  (Just the sort of thing that new WSI supplier Sendible.com can be set up to provide a dashboard for).  Finally he quoted @baekdal’s : “social media does not provide any value, it only enhances it” which is hard to beat in 11 words.

I’ve followed Avinask for a number of years now and pleased that he lived up to his reputation (something that is not always the case) with his combination of up-to-date insight and detail how-to.

I’ll try and post some more insights from the other speakers later this week.

Web analytics play an important role in the success of a marketing strategy but those new to internet marketing often overlook the importance. Even basic statistics, if analysed carefully can bring improvements to a campaign. So what should you look for? Read on to see where you can effect a change and a return for your efforts.

Definition of the Sales Process
You need to identify each stage in the sales process, and understand what is expected of your customer. Consider the following questions:

• Do you offer enough incentive for the visitor to engage with your sales process?
• Does each phase of the sales process gel together as an overall strategy?
• Is the customer guided easily through the process?

As an example, offer a free incentive and catch the visitor’s attention before offering your product.

Create a Measure
Put in place parameters to measure your success against. Ideally, these should form a natural extension of your sales procedure. Including new monthly subscriptions, conversion rates, downloads, etc. Begin with the targeted content to use in your marketing and look at the following:

• Current opt in rate per visitor
• Email conversion rate
• Average shelf life of membership
• Upsell conversion rate

Time to Figure Cost Per Visitor
Calculate the cost per visitor to you by working out the conversion rate for each stage of the marketing procedure, which culminates in the required end result, Look at identifying the associated value of the average customer.

Setting the Right Budget
Once you have worked out the cost per visitor work out the budget for each marketing strategy. Remember, if you are paying more for your cost per visitor, you do not have a sustainable strategy,  unless your web analytics can identify the source of each sale you make online. Use the statistics you have to set up a suitable budget that you can stay within.

Compare conversion rates monthly to assess what are good and bad rates. If you see growth over his period, then this is a good result.

If you need help in web analytics, call us on 0845 658 1812.